Mobile devices access data primarily from wireless networks using traditional protocols such as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Transport Layer Security (also called HTTP Secure or HTTP over Secure Sockets Layer) (HTTPS), etc. These traditional protocols were developed on traditional wired networks where congestion is low and bandwidth is inexpensive and available. As a result, these traditional protocols are less efficient and consume more bandwidth than needed on wireless networks. For example, consumers of cellular data networks are charged by the amount of data that is sent. The more unnecessary or redundant data can be reduced leads to lowered costs. Additionally, wireless bandwidth and scaling is limited by frequency spectrum availability. Therefore, increasing the efficiency of data transmission also increases the limited scalability of wireless networks.
Traditionally, when higher capacity networks were interconnected with lesser capacity Wide Area Network (WAN) links, Byte Caches have been deployed on both ends of the narrow WAN link to remove duplicate data. Byte Caches include a pair of appliances that have a large shared cache of byte patterns. As data flows between the pair of appliances, each appliance learns and stores the byte patterns. Accordingly, when byte patterns are recognized, the bytes can be eliminated and replaced by the caches. These appliances are designed to share very large byte caches across many data streams. Both ends must learn and record the byte patterns and must run complex synchronization protocols.
While this is quite effective for WAN links (i.e., since the byte cache is shared by all of the devices using that link), the byte caches do not work for mobile devices because the mobile device is a network of a single device directly connected to the wireless network. Stated in another way, there is no traffic aggregation point where the traditional byte cache can be deployed.
In view of the foregoing, a need exists for an improved network data reduction system in an effort to overcome the aforementioned obstacles and deficiencies of conventional network systems.